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The Rocking P Gazette in Western Canadian Ranching History
Clay Chattaway and Warren Elofson
The Rocking P Gazette newspaper was the creation of two girls aged twelve and fourteen living on their family's ranch in the foothills of
southern Alberta in 1923. Dorothy Margaret Macleay and her younger sister Gertrude Maxine produced the paper, edited it, acted as it
principal reporters, wrote many of its articles and stories, and sketched and painted nearly all its art. This seems all the more remarkable
considering that during the time when these two young ladies generated the seventeen monthly editions of the paper they also attended
school and regularly contributed their energy to the Rocking P ranch which their father Roderick Riddle Macleay and mother Laura Margaret
Macleay (nee Sturtevant) were industriously attempting to put on a sound financial foundation. The Macleays would eventually achieve that
end but not without some very creative planning. Their methods illustrate the strategies family ranching operations have sometimes turned to
since the beginning of the twentieth century to stay in production. To appreciate this while understanding the part the Rocking P Gazette
played as well as the geographic and cultural setting in which it operated, it is instructive to follow the evolution of the western Canadian cattle
ranching industry from its birth in the 1870s through to the Second World War.
Foundations of the Ranching Industry
In the later nineteenth century the ranching industry came to the northern Great Plains bordering the mountainous regions of western
Montana before spreading northward to the Alberta foothills. Montana saw its first cattle in the 1860s as small traders tried to feed the
demand for food from miners searching for gold and silver around the fledgling urban centres of Bannack, Virginia City, and Helena. In the
beginning these cattle were mostly exhausted and lame animals migrating settlers sold off or abandoned on their trek to regions farther west.
Then, larger numbers of cattle called "westerns" were trailed in from the Pacific seaboard via the Oregon Trail. In the 1870s, stock also arrived
in Montana as part of the expansion of the open range ranching system in Texas. In 1866, traders in that state began to search for new markets
for largely feral cattle that had been left to wander the plains during the American Civil War. They initially drove their herds to the "corn belt"
of the midwest, where the cattle were placed on farms to be fattened properly before the final journey by rail to the packinghouses in Chicago.
At the same time, soon-to-be-well-known paths such as the Chisholm and the Goodnight-Loving trails were opened to stock "new" rangeland in
mining districts of the far north. Nelson Story trailed the first large herd of Texas Longhorns to the gold fields of western Montana in 1866,
though he and his men had to use their guns to protect the animals on the open range from the Sioux and Cheyenne Nations. Robert S. (Bob)
Ford went to Texas for 300 head in 1868, and, in 1870 and 1873 respectively, herds of 1,500 were brought in to fatten on grasslands in Lewis
and Clark, Teton, and Cascade counties. As more and more Texas cattle inhabited the Montana ranges they interbred with the westerns that
continued to arrive principally from Oregon, and then with Herford, Shorthorn, and Angus breeds that some cattlemen imported from the
eastern United States and from Great Britain.
Starting in the 1870s, increasing numbers of the cattle in Montana were driven across the Canadian bordertofeed Native bands facing
starvation with the destruction of the bison herds. The missionary brothers, John and David McDougall, maintained a few cattle near Morley
west of Calgary from the beginning of the decade. In 1877 former whisky trader, H.A. (Fred) Kanouse, turned twenty-one cows and a bull loose
on the open range near Fort Macleod.Then John Miller arrived from Montana with some twenty-five head, which "he too put out to rustle for
themselves." During the spring of 1878, a number of small businessmen, including Tom Lynch, who had migrated west from Missouri, and
George Emerson, a Canadian who had teamed up with Lynch in Montana, drove in hundreds of horses and cattle. These they sold to men
already on the frontier, the majority of them former North West Mounted Police officers who had attained a discharge from the force to take
up ranching. In 1879 Emerson and Lynch drove in a thousand cattle and horses to start up their own ranch on the north side of the Highwood
Rivera few miles west of the town of High River. By 1880 some two hundred small herds were grazing on the free grass between the United
States border and the Bow River.

The Rocking P Gazette in Western Canadian Ranching History
Clay Chattaway and Warren Elofson
The Rocking P Gazette newspaper was the creation of two girls aged twelve and fourteen living on their family's ranch in the foothills of
southern Alberta in 1923. Dorothy Margaret Macleay and her younger sister Gertrude Maxine produced the paper, edited it, acted as it
principal reporters, wrote many of its articles and stories, and sketched and painted nearly all its art. This seems all the more remarkable
considering that during the time when these two young ladies generated the seventeen monthly editions of the paper they also attended
school and regularly contributed their energy to the Rocking P ranch which their father Roderick Riddle Macleay and mother Laura Margaret
Macleay (nee Sturtevant) were industriously attempting to put on a sound financial foundation. The Macleays would eventually achieve that
end but not without some very creative planning. Their methods illustrate the strategies family ranching operations have sometimes turned to
since the beginning of the twentieth century to stay in production. To appreciate this while understanding the part the Rocking P Gazette
played as well as the geographic and cultural setting in which it operated, it is instructive to follow the evolution of the western Canadian cattle
ranching industry from its birth in the 1870s through to the Second World War.
Foundations of the Ranching Industry
In the later nineteenth century the ranching industry came to the northern Great Plains bordering the mountainous regions of western
Montana before spreading northward to the Alberta foothills. Montana saw its first cattle in the 1860s as small traders tried to feed the
demand for food from miners searching for gold and silver around the fledgling urban centres of Bannack, Virginia City, and Helena. In the
beginning these cattle were mostly exhausted and lame animals migrating settlers sold off or abandoned on their trek to regions farther west.
Then, larger numbers of cattle called "westerns" were trailed in from the Pacific seaboard via the Oregon Trail. In the 1870s, stock also arrived
in Montana as part of the expansion of the open range ranching system in Texas. In 1866, traders in that state began to search for new markets
for largely feral cattle that had been left to wander the plains during the American Civil War. They initially drove their herds to the "corn belt"
of the midwest, where the cattle were placed on farms to be fattened properly before the final journey by rail to the packinghouses in Chicago.
At the same time, soon-to-be-well-known paths such as the Chisholm and the Goodnight-Loving trails were opened to stock "new" rangeland in
mining districts of the far north. Nelson Story trailed the first large herd of Texas Longhorns to the gold fields of western Montana in 1866,
though he and his men had to use their guns to protect the animals on the open range from the Sioux and Cheyenne Nations. Robert S. (Bob)
Ford went to Texas for 300 head in 1868, and, in 1870 and 1873 respectively, herds of 1,500 were brought in to fatten on grasslands in Lewis
and Clark, Teton, and Cascade counties. As more and more Texas cattle inhabited the Montana ranges they interbred with the westerns that
continued to arrive principally from Oregon, and then with Herford, Shorthorn, and Angus breeds that some cattlemen imported from the
eastern United States and from Great Britain.
Starting in the 1870s, increasing numbers of the cattle in Montana were driven across the Canadian bordertofeed Native bands facing
starvation with the destruction of the bison herds. The missionary brothers, John and David McDougall, maintained a few cattle near Morley
west of Calgary from the beginning of the decade. In 1877 former whisky trader, H.A. (Fred) Kanouse, turned twenty-one cows and a bull loose
on the open range near Fort Macleod.Then John Miller arrived from Montana with some twenty-five head, which "he too put out to rustle for
themselves." During the spring of 1878, a number of small businessmen, including Tom Lynch, who had migrated west from Missouri, and
George Emerson, a Canadian who had teamed up with Lynch in Montana, drove in hundreds of horses and cattle. These they sold to men
already on the frontier, the majority of them former North West Mounted Police officers who had attained a discharge from the force to take
up ranching. In 1879 Emerson and Lynch drove in a thousand cattle and horses to start up their own ranch on the north side of the Highwood
Rivera few miles west of the town of High River. By 1880 some two hundred small herds were grazing on the free grass between the United
States border and the Bow River.